


Stumbleine

by faerymorstan



Series: Snow Queen 'Verse [7]
Category: Der Räuberbräutigam | The Robber Bridegroom (Fairy Tale), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Blood and Gore, Gen, Horror, Psychological Horror, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-26
Updated: 2013-04-26
Packaged: 2017-12-09 13:03:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/774511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faerymorstan/pseuds/faerymorstan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A re-telling of <i>Mr. Fox/The Robber Bridegroom</i> in the key of <i>BBC Sherlock.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beloved

**Author's Note:**

> This string of 221Bs is based on _Mr. Fox,_ which is a charnelhouse horror of a folktale. It is grisly. Please heed the tags and proceed with caution.
> 
> These poems take place in the _Snow Queen_ AU a bit more than a year after the events of that story.
> 
> Also: [Stumbleine.](http://www.last.fm/music/The+Smashing+Pumpkins/_/Stumbleine)

Molly is restless.

Her beloved, whom she weds tomorrow, is away. He has business in a nearby village:  _a trifle, my darling, and nothing to trouble yourself about._

His name is Richard Fox, and he’s an actor with a traveling troupe. He is fine features and pale skin and dark hair and great lambent eyes that start shy and grow eager and Molly cannot, cannot see enough of them.

She has never seen his house.

Richard is clumsy with his words, his body. So like her--yet so unlike, his cleverness a quicksilver thing that shifts its weight between its paws too fast for her to follow.

Delightful.

Not to the tom, though: he’ll none of Richard.  _Lestrade, you old grouch,_ Molly has scolded, but the tom has only glowered back.

Her wedding dress, a moss-green silk whose sleeves she stitched with twining lines of thorns, hangs ready from the rafters, sachets of herbs tied inside. Wards she grew herself. She trusts them, feels safe-held in them, the way her bones feel in her skin.

Still: restless.

She has never seen his house.

Richard isn’t there, now.

It’s nestled in the pine grove that died when the borers came, he says.

Molly slips on her cloak. _Don’t look like that, grouchling,_ she tells the tom.  _I’m only curious. He’ll understand, my beloved._


	2. Bold

The late autumn sky is clear and starry. As she walks (path bright: moon waxing, two nights from full), Molly greets the asterisms as the old friends they are: the Rifle, the Great Ship and the Little, the Alchemist.

An hour’s walk, and then, the dead pines. Molly pulls her cloak close, wondering at the spiky, pale lines of them, poor bare things.  She weaves between them until she sees the house: a castle, almost, a thing of turrets and age-dark stone. She wonders who built it, and when; Sherlock would know, but he’s not here to drone at her.

He and John have never met Richard. Richard’s been busy all summer, playing the festival season, so they’ll meet tomorrow at the wedding. For the best, really: Sherlock tends to, well,  _Sherlock._

She comes to the wrought-iron gate: heavy, so heavy, and twice her height. Sharp letters catch the moonlight:

_**Be bold, be bold.** _

Richard’s family’s words, perhaps. She’s never heard him say them, but then, he doesn’t speak of his family.

The gate yields to her push with a squeal. She shuts it behind her (doesn’t turn her back to the house--silly, so silly, her) and climbs the steep stairs to the front door. Tilts her head up, sees the words painted above her:

_**Be bold, but not too bold.** _


	3. Basement

The house is drafty and prone to echoes, but Molly thinks it’s like any grand house: stiff furniture, oversized portraits, wallpaper of questionable taste. Not what she expected of Richard’s home--or hers, for tomorrow she’ll start to move her things here and where, oh, where will--no. She’s ahead of herself.

It’s fine. It’s all fine.

A heady incense permeates the hall; under it, a scent reminds her of the shed behind the cabin where she learnt her craft from an old death-tender  _(Gods, girl, it’s a mercy your gift’s for the dead: you’re too much a stumbleine for the living.)_

The scent: doesn’t Richard smell it?

Richard is lithe limbs and warm skin, freckles from weeks of outdoor performance, easy smiles and awkward hands. An arm extended, gentlemanly, at her front door. Borrowed grace made natural, onstage; bright ribbons, fairings he’d made her presents of, in her hair.  

Molly fusses with her engagement band and wonders how Richard,  _her_ Richard, expects her to thrive here.

A small door beneath the staircase looks like it ought to lead to a broom closet, but there’s a third inscription above it:

**_Be bold, but not too bold, lest your blood run cold._ **

She pushes it open: more stairs lead down. Molly takes a candle from a wall sconce. Grimaces. Descends into the basement.


	4. Band

Molly moves slow, flame-shadows flickering. Her boots peel sticky from cement. The smell’s a thing her gut knows, but the candle’s small, the basement big, so she sees a pale smudge here, a dark drop there. Nothing that makes a map.

Fabric brushes her cheek, dried stiff. Her shoulder hits a damp thing, unseen. Something crunches underfoot.

Stumbleines who tend the dead know, no light needed, bone beneath a boot.

They are skeletal, fleshy, in-between. Eyes shut tight, blank-wide, long-decayed. In dresses, in nothing, in pieces. Hung from rafters, stretched for dissection, stacked against walls.

Women. Girls. Twoscore, perhaps.

Molly kneels. Holds out the candle: a small form. A small dress. Bloody plaits that Molly runs between her fingers. Whispers,  _Loveling, I’m sorry. I didn’t know._

The basement door creaks: footfalls. Something heavy, dragged.

Molly snuffs the candle and slips behind a barrel and doesn’t breathe, doesn’t breathe.

Richard carries a lantern in one hand and a corpse in the other. He drags them both to a table and struggles to remove something, Molly can’t see what, from the corpse’s left hand. He snarls, not her Richard, now, not a bit. Grabs a blade. Breaks the corpse’s wrist so hard the hand flies from the table.

It lands in Molly’s lap.

She would know that ring anywhere. It’s her engagement band.


	5. Breakfast

Molly’s skin prickles panic-hot and goes numb, numb. She can’t take her eyes from the hand (her age; more elegant).

If I have to, she thinks, her mind a bloody, beating thing recalling those last, hardest lessons at the death-tender’s cabin: I will. If.

Richard buries the blade in the table and storms up the stairs, lips all disgust. Doesn’t see her.

Never, Molly thinks, saw her.

Before she leaves: her work. She hasn’t time for the science of it (though how she would like to, how good it would feel to find the whats and hows and how-manys, to make a record), but the ritual: that, yes, she can do.

She starts at the table. Lays the hand with the body, rummages in the pouch at her waist, clinks through vials ’til she finds what she wants: distillations of ivy, aloe, yew. Three drops on the forehead, smudged once with her thumb; rites she mouths quiet as she can; relief when she feels the soul rest, release.

On to the next. Again. Until, when she whispers the words that let her hear what’s held back, there is peace.

Then home, taking one thing with her, and a fire for burning her clothes and ribbons, for boiling water to bathe in.

After sunrise: she sets the table. Richard’s coming for breakfast.


	6. Bury

_I had,_ Molly tells the apple she’s slicing,  _the strangest dream._

Richard scatters sugar over oatmeal.  _How’s that, darling?_

_I dreamt I went to your house, and it was dark, so dark._

_Never worry, for it’s not._ Untroubled.

Molly peels skin from fruit.  _And there were doors, and over them were words, cold words._

More sugar.  _Never worry, for there aren’t._

_And you kept bodies in the basement, and I was frightened, so frightened._

_Never worry,_ he says, spoon clinking against teeth,  _for I don’t, and you needn’t be._

Molly reaches into her satchel. Finds the weight she wants.  _Richard,_ she says, _I don’t agree._

She sets the hand on the table.

He sets down his spoon.

His grin goes vulpine, his chair to the ground, his hands to Molly’s throat. He pins her to the swept dirt floor, the silver tom clawing at his back, and she shuts her eyes and makes her lips form the words, the forbidden ones, that untether life from flesh.

He dies, she thinks, surprised.

She skips, a bit--she isn’t real, her mind’s a bright blank--but she’s knocking on a door and the silver tom is in her arms and has it always hurt so to swallow and Sherlock asks no questions. Calls over his shoulder, _John! Get the shovel. There’s a body to bury._


	7. Bit

_Richard Brook,_ John says, startled by the body’s face.

_Richard Fox,_ Molly disagrees, voice hoarse,  _like I told you._

_James Moriarty,_ Sherlock concludes, unholy glee in every syllable.  _Tell me everything, Molly. No! Don’t say a word, I want to deduce--_

_Sherlock,_ John warns as Molly rasps,  _Just get rid of it. Don’t tell me where._

John and Sherlock take the corpse and Molly puts the cottage to rights and draws herself another bath and heats a compress for her neck and sits before the fire with the silver tom and is not, she suspects, all right.

She doesn’t know what to do with her wedding dress.

She wore it this morning, she did, drew its strength and wards, silk and thorns. It’s a thing gone pale; she gives it to the flames. Watches it catch bright, curl to ash.

*

When the snows come and the trees are corpses and Molly can’t stand the sight of them, John brings firewood; when the cottage is a nightmare of Richard and Molly can’t sleep there, John makes a pallet in the front room; when Molly can’t talk or cry or be alone, John waits with her.

The joy and frustration of Sherlock: he treats her the same, after.

Her mending’s a slow thing. A stumbleine. But it happens. It does. Bit by bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would never, could never, have finished this without [aderyn.](http://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn) Writing it was a terror and no mistake; aderyn, thank you for going into the labyrinth with me. You made being there bearable.


End file.
